| Story Text | [{"record_id":"0","storytext":"Gopal Ghose (1913\u20141980) was one of the founding members of the Calcutta Group in 1943, the first such collective of Indian modern artists who professed an aesthetic agenda that sought to confront the problems of the modern world and move beyond the pale imitations of the Bengal School of painting and the academic naturalists of their day. He is best remembered for his expressionistic nature studies that he executed en plein air<\/I> or from memory after cycling around the country to absorb these views. In his role as a teacher at Calcutta\u2019s Government College of Art and Craft he would encourage students to leave the confines of their studios and meet the world outside. This image depicts an occasion when the world outside met him with almost unimaginable violence and bloodletting, forcing Ghose to respond emotionally to the scenes he saw around him.","initialize":"true","storytextauthor":"Ankan Kazi"},{"record_id":"1","storytext":"This painting was made in 1946, the year of the terrible Direct Action Day riots of Calcutta, when communal violence took more than four thousand lives and rendered close to one-hundred thousand people homeless. Ghose\u2019s expressionistic rendering of a great conflagration sums up the apocalyptic tenor of the time.","initialize":"true","storytextauthor":""},{"record_id":"2","storytext":"Ghose filled two sketchbooks recording his observations of the sufferings of the people during the great famine of 1943. Employing straightforward drawing techniques then, similar to those made by Zainul Abedin too, Ghose evolved a more abstract and expressionistic language by 1946 to depict a more complex image of trauma and despair that he saw around him. The burning musical instrument in the middle of the image telegraphs a sense of cultural disharmony that led to one of the worst communal riots in modern memory.","initialize":"true","storytextauthor":""},{"record_id":"3","storytext":"The roiling black strokes, suggesting smoke from the fires, reflect Ghose\u2019s early interest in calligraphy, arabesques and the bold line-work of Jamini Roy and Zainul Abedin. Even though he did not adopt the folk forms of Roy in as straightforward a manner, he maintained the use of lines and expressive brush marks to heighten his poetic apprehension of complex, imaginary spaces. Some of the initial sketches he made after observing people dying on the streets of Calcutta in 1943 due to the famine used these black lines and arabesque forms more prominently; these were published in Bengal Painters\u2019 Testimony<\/I> in 1944.","initialize":"true","storytextauthor":""},{"record_id":"4","storytext":"Although this image presents a predominantly abstracted view, it is substantially informed by Ghose\u2019s mastery of drawing which helped structure the image. He went to study life-drawing at the Government School of Art in Madras (staying there till 1938) run at the time by Deviprasad Roy Chowdhury, who would become an important mentor for Ghose. Even as actual figures appear to be attenuated if not rejected totally in this image, their activities are impressionistically rendered through traces of their effect on the life of the city.","initialize":"true","storytextauthor":""},{"record_id":"5","storytext":"Ghose made another work in 1946 that uses similar elements, including the evocation of smoke and fire with sinuous yellow and black brush-strokes\u2014this time more obviously depicting a burning vehicle with a huddled group of figures at the back. It suggests that Ghose was abstracting his images from views that were all too real and traumatic for an artist who could do little more than convey the scale of the tragedy. Commenting on this image, an art historian has written, \u2018Violence has been transcribed on to the possibilities of a pictorial language, the expressive potential of contrasting colour and the mark-making stabs of the brush.\u2019 In this image, the pictorial language has simply been refined and abstracted further by removing all naturalistic details\u2014except for the recognizable musical instrument, either a piano or a harmonium.","initialize":"true","storytextauthor":""},{"record_id":"6","storytext":"Critics have remarked on Ghose\u2019s commitment to an individualistic search for an aesthetic paradigm, especially after he left the Calcutta Group in 1948. Even though he went on tours of the famine-stricken streets of Calcutta, making sketches of the same that were published in the fortnightly Left journal Swadhinata<\/I>, he refused to subscribe to any ideology, perhaps responding to the number of disasters being globally produced by extreme ideological visions of the time, from fascism and Stalinism, to communalism and imperialism: most of which sought an almost ritual cleansing of their heterogenous, complex societies with the zealous fires of purity. ","initialize":"true","storytextauthor":""},{"record_id":"7","storytext":"Unlike the deliberate return to nature professed by the artists at Santiniketan, Ghose\u2019s relationship to nature was largely exilic; reflecting an urban individual\u2019s psychological need for nature as refuge in an industrialized landscape. This image is not of one of his famous nature studies, but it is informed by his expressionistic views of natural life, transforming serenity into an atmosphere of despair and tragedy through similar means of approach, which tended to be emotional.","initialize":"true","storytextauthor":""},{"record_id":"8","storytext":"At the time, modern primitivism was on the rise as a global language in art. Seeking to return those traumatized by their experiences of war, famines and the violence of decolonial movements to simpler times, Ghose was sensitive and romantic enough to respond to these psychological needs in his art. This leads to his sweeping expression of the times as violent and turbulent\u2014expressed through a vision of blood and fire.","initialize":"true","storytextauthor":""},{"record_id":"9","storytext":"The famous art historian A. K. Coomaraswamy labelled Rabindranath Tagore as a \u2018na\u00efve\u2019 painter, meaning that his images were not informed by any artistic movements around him. Stella Kramrisch also suggested Sunayani Devi to be a na\u00efve painter, due to her \u2018cultural integrity\u2019 that resisted the tainted hybridity that working men embodied in the late colonial world. Ghose\u2019s neo-Bengal School style was formed against the background of these debates about naivety and primitivism, expressing the conflict between a sheltered ignorance of the larger world outside and a yearning to return to a pre-industrial (and perhaps, premodern) past.","initialize":"true","storytextauthor":""},{"record_id":"10","storytext":"The roots of these ideas go back to the German philosopher Frederich Schiller, who made a distinction between the na\u00efve poet and the sentimental poet. While the na\u00efve poet imitated and described their environment as they saw it, the sentimental poet attempted to mediate his views of the world through his own reflections and relationships with it. By this definition, it would appear that Ghose fits more into the category of a sentimental painter, for whom nature was not a direct object of imitation (like it was for an academic painter like J. P. Gangooly), but an occasion to process his own relationship with the world around him. This partly explains the similarity of approach Ghose brought to his nature studies as well as this view of a violent urban scene, perhaps depicting a bonfire of the vanities when our common cultural heritage is deemed almost heretical as it comes under the attack of exclusive national-communal imaginaries.","initialize":"true","storytextauthor":""}] |
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| Art Artist Names Single | Gopal Ghose |
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